Climate Change Response Bill 2010

I’m with Al on this one. The country desperately needs a new government – of whatever complexion. When the Greens decided to pull the plug earlier this month, the remaining duration of this Government was going to be set by the amount of time required to fully enact the provisions of the Budget. The Greens now have no right to seek to extend their costly legislative legacy. Enough is enough.

Yes, Brian, if only they hadn’t brought it out today, then .

To tired to comment fully, though preliminary observation:

“where an assessment referred to in subsection (1) is that
the measures concerned have not been effective or
sufficiently effective in the achievement of their purpose,
include a statement of additional measures that, in the
opinion of the Government, are required to achieve that
purpose”

= A+

But I have some reservations about proposed role of advisory body. Seems like we could have a missed opportunity here.

How meaningful is to legislate for policy objectives or targets. Who goes to jail if the targets are not met. Policy only needs to be adopted by government, specific legislative actions are required to meet the policy targets, eg taxes, building standards, prohibiting certain actions etc. Passing a law with a target does not make it happen.

@Debt Slave
I’m not convinced by wind power either. But your rhetorical blunderbuss is better suited to politics.ie.

Things will improve when politicians can be found on street corners holding signs that read, “Will Tax For Food.”

How much is this going to cost me, Joe taxpayer?

Unlike Debt Slave, I believe global warming with attendant climate change are happening. I think the majority of voters agree with that, though the state of opinion is difficult to ascertain. Unfortunately, Nature does not consult the state of public opinion before deciding what to do.

A Climate Change Bill and a price on carbon are absolutely necessary.

However, I hate to see this become a “Green Party” issue. I have never supported the Green Party, and would have preferred a cross-party Bill. My concern is that the Greens will do the cause of mitigating Climate Change a lot of damage by trying to “own” the issue. It will become all the harder to separate the two in the public mind. That climate change is a “green radical” fad is often use to frame the debate and confuse the issue. This Bill has not made me change my mind one iota about not voting for the Greens.

You want to impose suffering on the people of this country. It is not fair or just.

The impetus for ‘doing something’ is that much worse suffering will be imposed in the long run if we do nothing. Wouldn’t you agree that that is fairer, and more just?

I’m not convinced by climate change scare stories. This is the majority opinion among voters.

The majority of voters trust science (obviously), and science tells us that global warming is real, and happening. Perhaps you have a poll of the Irish electorate which suggests otherwise?

@Tol

are they supportive now that a large chunk of them are unemployed?
are they supportive now that they have to be Debt Slaves for generations?
are they supportive now that the economy has gone down the gutter?
are they supportive now that they are paying more for petrol/diesel?
are they supportive now that they are freezing their asses and heating oil is more expensive?

Considering that Ireland is now an IMF run 3rd world developing country, especially once you strip out all the assets which where acquired on borrowed money, should we not be exempt from this carbon taxation madness

@ Al: “This is crazy nonsense”. Amen!

@jc: ““where an assessment referred to in subsection (1) is that
the measures concerned have not been effective or
sufficiently effective in the achievement of their purpose,
include a statement of additional measures that, in the
opinion of the Government, are required to achieve that
purpose”

= A+”

Whose A+??? I thought you were quoting Grouch from ‘Night at the Opera’ . Jeeze!!

@BL: “They display all the attributes of a messianic eschatological cult now.”

Messianic eschatological cult. JK Galbraith would be proud of that one.

BpW

BpW

A timely article in the NYT then:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html

I’m still amazed at the number of agnotologists who refuse to accept facts when they are shown to be contrary to their dearly held beliefs.

I’m aware of a more recent survey regarding the Irish public’s attitudes to Global Warming.

300 people were asked by Duncan Stewart’s production company earlier this year for a vox pop component of a TV programme. Although exact figures were not released, Duncan told Marian Finucane that about 10% of people had the same viewpoint as Duncan.

From the several dozen of these interviews broadcast on RTE it’s clear that most of the other 90% believe it to be a scam.

@EWI

One internationally renowned polymath (and lead author of several IPCC chapters) told the Inter-Academy Council investigating IPCC failures:

“Working Group 2 systematically portrays climate change as a bigger problem than is scientifically acceptable.”
and
“Working Group 3 systematically portrays climate policy as easier and cheaper than can be responsibly concluded from academic research.”

http://ipccar5wg2ch10.blogspot.com/2010/05/submission-to-iac-second-draft.html

Clearly, the majority of voters should not trust this particular offspring of science. And, in reality, they don’t. No matter what you say.

The “much worse suffering will be imposed in the long run” you claim has no basis in fact. It’s hard to imagine a catastrophe worse than losing 80% of your energy use forever due to a small group of deluded but politically cosseted fanatics.

It is the duty of government to advance the interests and welfare of the nation. This can often involve providing leadership, and I would offer the example of the smoking ban as one minor example that international competitors adapted.
However, this proposal will be an international of what states will not do, as it is an example of national interest being sacraficed for a future partially understood.
These moral notions will result in a national economic castration all to satisfy that smug feeling of a class within this country whose children won’t be feeling the consequences in schools nor hospitals.
This is theocracy not republican government

Happy hols
Been an interesting year, and this blog helped keep it interesting and intelligent.
Respect to the dedication of Philip, Karl, Brian, Eoin, John the optimist and every other person.
I hope we all get what we deserve next year…
Lord knows we didn’t deserve this!

@ Debt Slave

Plus, a small lesson on statistics: “several dozen” != “most”

@EWI
I employed techniques from the “social science” of applied psychology to filter the observation.

My conjecture was that the programme’s funders – (the taxpayer by way of) the EPA, RTE and the Department of the Environment etc. (coincidentally all under the auspices of the Green Party) would be decidedly non-plussed with 52 minutes of people saying “It’s the greatest scam in human history”. I worked my way back from there.

Given the rarefied and shrinking cohort of the Faithful doubtless you’re in a position to ask Duncan yourself? FOI doesn’t cover it I’m afraid.

In any case don’t be such a grumpy Scrooge; wish us all a merry Christmas. And stay warm.

Thanks Richard. I have to ask you though why you left a good solid hard science to get into a soft hand wavy “science” like Economics? 🙂

That was a rhetorical btw just like my previous query! Best wishes.

Taxing pollution makes sense. Taxing carbon seems to make as much sense as taxing labour, consumption, savings or property. The GP have adopted completely the wrong approach in my view. I strongly suspect the next government will completely ignore these targets. But even if it doesn’t work it gives the GP a fig leaf to justify participation in this government. The way they are doing it though really doesn’t show them in a good light.

I would prefer the GP had adopted a sound economic basis for their actions. By this I mean reducing pollution and carbon emissions at minimal economic cost. Their other initiatives, which the next government will curtail, will have little impact on climate change.

It could all have been so different. If Gormley had said, “we have a massive deficit. We must raise taxes. I am legislating for a progressively increasing tax on emissions, it’s the right thing to do”, he would have been successful, I believe. He could have done this years ago in return for NAMA. Instead he’s given us a green stroke. His party’s economic illiteracy has made them fail yet again.

@ Ossian
With an election looming and the greens stating a wish for it to be in January, questioning the merits of pushing the imposition of an Act should involve questioning the motives of those involved.
Further, do not confuse rhetoric with anger.
And the,charge of logical fallacy is laughable.
In an age when construction workers are classed as ‘green jobs’, let me ask you a question!
Do you want to leave the euro?

Apart from the scientific arguments against the model of man-made global warming threatening to destroy the planet, this bill should be looked at in the context of what it is trying to do to us economically.

On the first, I as a geologist am ready to debate it any time but no proponent will defend it. Sorry they will, by telling me that I’m an eejit, or other ad hominem accusations (e.g. see EWI above, Dec 24, 9.32pm). In other words, no alarmist will debate the science. If it is so clear-cut, I fail to see why they won’t debate the science – it should be a walkover if they’re right.

On the economic argument, the bill is largely aspirational and dreams of a noble future without fossil fuels. We tried that up to the end of the 19th century and it is obviously forgotten that the large expansion of the middle classes is due to cheap energy. Subsidised and unreliable wind energy is not going to replace oil or coal. All the green industries in Ireland (e.g waste management) already need subsidies – a carbon tax is just another one.

When the government tells us how our society will achieve the aspirations in the bill, we will be in a position to judge it properly. At the very least, I want to see why the costs of abandoning modern society are better than trying to stop the increase of a trace gas in the atmosphere without any guarantee of success.

above continued…..hit send in error

…given that AGW is long run problem, how relevant is the recession?

RT – Did you write that with a straight face?

The Eurobarometer survey has three questions about alternative energy sources.

Q9 asks respondents if they would pay more for greener energy.
Excluding don’t knows, a majority of Europeans (and Irish) say they would pay more.

Also a majority of Europeans (and Irish) believe that the renewables 20% target is about right or too modest. (Q12)

Notable about Ireland in this survey is that there is a high proportion of don’t know answers to the questions about the 20-20-20 targets and willingness to pay more for green energy. This could indicate open-mindedness or lack of knowledge or even honesty.

The Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change has been discussing policy for three years. This climate change bill has been in negotiation for over a year. Following a long Irish tradition, this law is based on existing previously enacted UK legislation, to mitigate the risk of unexpected consequences. So I think it would be hard to argue that the Climate Change Bill is rushed.

But will it do any good? The UK Climate Change Act created a new administration whose reports are here: http://www.theccc.org.uk/
You can read the reports and make a judgement.

A common question is whether target setting is effective. For anyone in commercial management, it is self evident that metrics and targets are indispensable- rightly or wrongly, academics and governments may disagree.

There is currently no statistically significant scientific evidence that man-made global warming is occurring. However, there is new evidence emerging that we are entering a new global cooling phase. There is no scientific evidence that this cooling could be a man-made phenomenon.

Oh, for a citation or two!

@EWI

If you understood anything about the scientific method you would realise that the null hypothesis is that “man-made global warming does not exist”. this is what has to be rejected within a specified statistical significance. therefore the onus is for you to provide the so-called ‘scientific’ references for me. I have looked at the most cited ‘scientific’ evidence, and they fail to reject the null. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I can provide you with a citation on the scientific method if you like? Try Popper for a philosophical start on the subject

Thank you Richard, I’ll take a look at your paper with interest and open scientific mind

@ apS

As even RTol concedes (though perhaps grudgingly), the scientific view says otherwise. I repeat; it is up to you to provide some basis for your confident assertion that the scientists who study this are wrong. If not, you are, regrettably, just another loon on the Internet.

If I didn’t value my anonymity (no, you don’t know me), I’d wager a tidy sum of money against this latest little excursion by economists into ‘doing’ climatology standing the test of peer review. I see that it’s already the subject of some dispute:

“So the new best thing in the denialsphere is a paper by Michael Beenstock and Yaniv Reingewertz from the Department of Economics of the The Hebrew University where they pull a Wegman, analyzing climate data without knowing anything about the science. Now this is par for the course in economics where there are no constraints, but it ain’t so cool when you deal with physical reality.”

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/03/idiots-delight.html

“Somebody else who thinks that statistics triumphs over physics. Or in other words, someone who thinks that the planet has to respond in some neat statistical way to a forcing. It doesn’t. Since this appears to be a working paper, I would advise that they do some more work – for instance with the AR4 archive to demonstrate that their methodology is able to distinguish causes in much simpler (though realistic) cases.”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/

I make no claims to be a statistician (running some numbers through SPSS is as far as my abilities go) but they do seem to raise some legitimate points about what is allegedly only a ‘working paper’. As I say, if this thing ever gets peer-reviewed, there should be fun.

@ RTol

“Imputing data is a statistician’s job.”

Those who bother to click through on even the Mann & Schmidt response will discover:

On that specific issue, presumably just an oversight, MW apparently used the “Start Year” column in the M08 spreadsheet instead of the “Start Year (for recon)” column. The difference between the two is related to the fact that many tree ring reconstructions only have a small number of trees in their earliest periods and that greatly inflates their uncertainty (and therefore reduces their utility). To reduce the impact of this problem, M08 only used tree ring records when they had at least 8 individual trees, which left 59 series in the 1000 AD frozen network. The fact that there were only 59 series in the AD 1000 network of M08 was stated clearly in the paper, and the criterion regarding the minimal number of trees (8) was described in the Supplementary Information. The difference in results between the correct M08 network and spurious 95 record network MW actually used is unfortunately quite significant. Using the correct data substantially reduces the estimates of peak medieval warmth shown by MW (as well as reducing the apparent spread among the reconstructions). This is even more true when the frequently challenged “Tiljander” series are removed, leaving a network of 55 series. In their rebuttal, MW claim that M08 quality control is simply an ‘ad hoc’ filtering and deny that they made a mistake at all. This is not really credible, and it would have done them much credit to simply accept this criticism.

With just this correction, applying MW’s own procedures yields strong conclusions regarding how anomalous recent warmth is the longer-term context. MW found recent warmth to be unusual in a long-term context: they estimated an 80% likelihood that the decade 1997-2006 was warmer than any other for at least the past 1000 years. Using the more appropriate 55-proxy dataset with the same estimation procedure (which involved retaining K=10 PCs of the proxy data), yields a higher probability of 84% that recent decadal warmth is unprecedented for the past millennium

Did you even read that before replying?

@EWI
What is your name? What are your qualifications? You make a lot of posts questioning other people’s qualifications and you use a three letter name that could be anything.

In your recent post you cut and pasted a response from Mann and Schmidt. Now we would appreciate it if you could explain why this refutes McShane and Wyner (2010). These are difficult subjects and most of us need to have them explained.

What is clear from reading Andrew Monfort’s excellent The Hockey Stick Illusion and other sources is that Mann et al in the original 98 paper used a statisitical tool that found and exaggerated the importance of any data series with a hockey stick shape. Stephen McKittrick used the same model and produced similar results with random step series. Most of the papers that have supposedly supported the hockey stick have had some data series or statistical method that was flawed and had a disproportionate effect on the shape. What is also intriguing is that data from many of these tree ring proxies after 1960 or 1980 were ignored because inconveniently the rings reduced in size at a time when temperatures were rising. This make their use as temperature proxies very questionable.

If you provide me with your snail mail name and address I will post you my copy of the Hockey Stick Illusion if you promise to read it. That will not cost you anything except time.

Ulick Stafford BE MS PhD (all 3 in Chemical Engineering) MBA CEng

The Greens did not commit this country to the international obligations that are outstanding on Ireland, some of them involving substantial fines for non-compliance. Other governments did that. If the public had any faith in the other parties’ bona fides on the environment, the Greens would not have been electable in the first place.

What the Greens through this (likely doomed) Bill are doing is attempting to create a framework where Ireland will approach compliance as promised by successive administrations. It may well be that they are not doing this in the correct way, but to refuse to do anything involves more than simply refusing to vote on the bill – it will involve formally repudiating those previous commitments, however that may be achieved. Having become an international financial pariah I’m not sure the next logical move is to become an environmental one too.

This thread (the bits that aren’t the usual hairpulling by the usual suspects against one another) highlights the failure of both partisan and populist politics in dealing with multi-decade government interventions, the success of which will be ensured by coherency, consistency and tweaking rather than root and branch reworking in step with changes in governing parties.

As for “carbon taxes hurt the old, the sick” etc. – that’s if you treat the problem as one of price rather than one of income. Additionally, if there was a real commitment to home insulation for low income families as more than merely a stimulus package for un(der)employed contractors whose shoddy techniques are the reason those people are shivering in the first place, those people could reduce the proportion of income spent on energy anyway.